UPFRONT:PLINK, PLINK, PLINK. Or rather, tap, tippety, tap. Another week, another column, and my personal life gets more public. Ha! As if that were possible, thought I, before I took on this weekly assignment. After all, I've never been known for holding back: frankly, every taxi driver in town could chip in on the subject of my personal life.
It’s not that I am ever eager to talk about myself. It’s more that I never understand how one is supposed to answer personal questions without revealing personal details. “None of your business,” just seems ever so rude, and anyway, that’s hardly the point now, is it. Put like that, so little is your business but it would seem churlish to always stick by such conversational strictures.
I am also an atrocious liar, and although I’m the soul of discretion about anyone else’s business, ask me a straight-up question about my life and you’ll probably get a straight-up answer.
Which is why this column made perfect sense. Because I am, as it were, an open book. The column functions, therefore, merely as an addendum to a hundred taxi-driver chats, a thousand too-loudly-whispered exchanges, a million high-decibel mobile-phone conversations
Or so I thought. Bah. Little did I know. It’s one thing spilling to Padraig the taxi man – it goes in one ear and out the other, and he’s unlikely to retain the sorry details once I climb out and the next passenger climbs in. But it’s a whole other can of worms opening up in a national newspaper, a national newspaper that has an online archive now freely available to anyone who searches your name.
It turns out that people actually read this. That’s the good news. For years I’ve been writing into the newsprint void, hours and hours of my time tapping away and nobody has had a damn thing to say about it. Then shazam! I’m “Upfront” and for the first time readers actually talk back. They write to me, they e-mail me, they tell me how much they miss Róisín, and suddenly I’m actually aware that they’re there. And I love it. I love it and am flattered every single time (apart from the times when readers point out what a self-absorbed drone I am, or that I’m going to hell. But all the other times, absolutely!) Who knew you guys were out there? Hey y’all!
But it turns out it’s not just the perfect strangers who find themselves bored of a Saturday and end up with their eyes flicking involuntarily over this column. Ho no. Thanks to cursed technological progress, even my new in-laws a million miles away can access this. And take it from me, no matter how innocuous the content of one’s weekly rantings, an awareness of your mother- or father-in-law’s eyes on it ups the ante somewhat. Fact is, they’ve probably just read that last sentence. See? I knew I should have made it more eloquent, put in bigger words, made it more like the kind of thing you’d want a daughter-in-law to come out with – one who doesn’t spend all her time gassing to taxi drivers.
It’s not just my new family that I now have in mind when I’m writing, however. There’s also my friends. They are fair game for column fodder, you might think, but they still have their objections. Not when they’re mentioned, you understand, that doesn’t seem to bother them. No, they only come out in force to wave their placards and demand their rights if they’re not mentioned. One particular friend – my first boyfriend – even summoned me to a meeting where he proceeded to berate me over the inclusion in my column of peripheral lightweights from my past, despite his own continued absence. Our 20-year friendship was on the line.
As for the rest? They either a) look for veiled references to themselves in the columns, b) get asked by other people whether things in the column are veiled references to them, or c) ask solicitously about elements of my life that I’ve already written about, for crying out loud. I’m like “Girl, haven’t you read my column? No? I like totally covered all of this last week.” Sheesh.
Then there are the times when you put in the full name of your childhood crush because, let’s face it, he moved to Canada and he’s hardly going to ever, ever read his name in print here until bam! In your inbox! An e-mail from Peter Buckley saying “thanks for the mention”. The kind of e-mail that would have made you pass out back in the day. Now you’re wondering if he read the piece about you being married or whether you can bluff it for a few flirtatious e-mails just for old time’s sake, but oh no, now your whole life is on the internet so he’s already congratulating you on your nuptials. You just can’t get a break these days.
Then there are those who never, ever read this column even though I really wish they did. Like the bully in the BMW at Ikea last Sunday, the one who parked his car in the middle of the lot so nobody else could drive around, and then got all abusive when I suggested he nudge up a bit. The one who then came shaping up to me in my Nissan Micra all cusswords and not-back-downish. I sure wish he was reading, so I could give him a piece of my mind in print. Of course, now that eejit is after getting a totally unsolicited mention in the column and that first boyfriend is going to be spitting. See? I should have just kept my big mouth shut. But then what would I write about?